We numerically and experimentally investigated the upgradability of the longest and the typical segments of the JIH system. Through these studies, we confirmed that a 100 GHz-spaced 25 42.7 Gbit/s transmission with the total capacity of 1 Tbit/s can be attainable even by using NRZ signal and standard FEC for the typical segments. We also found that RZ signal format was desirable for the longest segment and a further wide system margin could be expected by using adjacent channel polarization control and advanced FEC technologies.

The effectiveness of periodic dispersion compensation on single-channel 40 Gbit/s soliton transmission system was experimentally investigated. This technique requires just the dispersion compensation fibers and wideband optical filters in the transmission line, which has no difficulty to be used in the practical system. By using polarization-division-multiplexing together with periodic dispersion compensation, single-channel 40 Gbit/s transmission over 4700 km was demonstrated. Single-polarization 40 Gbit/s transmission experiments, which are more suitable for system implementation and compatible with WDM were also conducted. We investigated the transmission characteristics and pulse dynamics in different dispersion maps and in the optimized dispersion map, single-channel, single-polarization 40 Gbit/s transmission over 6300 km was successfully demonstrated.

The effectiveness of Aeff enlarged positive dispersion fiber (EE-PDF) and hybrid amplification configuration with erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and fiber Raman amplifier for reducing the fiber nonlinearity and improving the transmission performance in long distance 40 Gbit/s-based WDM transmission was investigated. We have confirmed that the use of EE-PDF in modified dispersion map for 40 Gbit/s transmission is quite effective to increase the transmissible distance and have successfully demonstrated 16 40 Gbit/s WDM transmission over 2000 km with proper dispersion management. We have also confirmed that the use of distributed Raman amplification is quite effective to extend the repeater spacing. By adding the optimum Raman amplification, almost the same transmission performance was obtained with a doubled repeater spacing in long distance 40 Gbit/s-based WDM transmission.

A translucent wavelength switched optical network (WSON) is a cost-efficient infrastructure between opaque networks and transparent optical networks, which aims at seeking a graceful balance between network cost and service provisioning performance. In this paper, we experimentally present a resilient translucent WSON with the control of an enhanced path computation element (PCE) and extended generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) controllers. An adaptive routing and wavelength assignment scheme with the consideration of accumulated physical impairments, wavelength availabilities and regenerator allocation is experimentally demonstrated and evaluated for dynamic provisioning of lightpaths. By using two different network scenarios, we experimentally verify the feasibility of the proposed solutions in support of translucent WSON, and quantitatively evaluate the path computation latency, network blocking probability and service disruption time during end-to-end lightpath restoration. We also deeply analyze the experimental results and discuss the synchronization between the PCE and the network status. To the best of our knowledge, the most significant progress and contribution of this paper is that, for the first time, all the proposed methodologies in support of PCE/GMPLS controlled translucent WSON, including protocol extensions and related algorithms, are implemented in a network testbed and experimentally evaluated in detail, which allows verifying their feasibility and effectiveness when being potentially deployed into real translucent WSON.

The required bit resolution of digital-analog-converter (DAC) for optical OFDM was evaluated through simulation and experiment. We found that the signal degradation caused by quantization depends on the number of subcarriers theoretically, but the other noise generated in experiment suppresses the dependency. Additionally, signal degradation caused by quantization is independent of subcarrier modulation, and the performance improvement saturates with increasing bit resolution. With the criteria for the BER of 110-3, the required DAC resolution by simulation with ideal analog-digital-converter at receiver is 3 bits for QPSK, 4 bits for 8-QAM and 5 bits for 16-QAM and 32-QAM. From the experimental result, the required bit resolution is increased as 6 bits for 32-QAM.

The design of an energy-efficient wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transponder is proposed and effectiveness of the proposed WDM transponder is experimentally studied. The proposed WDM transponder interworking with the link-aggregation technique possessed by a layer 2 switch can achieve power saving depending on traffic volume variations by utilizing an adaptive interface control. Monitoring methods for the link connectivity of a sleep link are also discussed.